Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Later he sat watching Swing Time on channel 20. Deadeye Fred Astaire, late for his own wedding. How easily the man could have played a gangster, the cold-blooded city boss from a Hammett novel. Hat cocked low and over one eye, he speaks, he sings, he pretends he can’t dance. How well he lies, only to reveal the lie in the moment when he begins to move his body. And yet there is some complicity in the person lied to — for who wouldn’t know Fred Astaire just from watching him walk across a room? But there is a definite, defining distance to him, as if in some unfeeling being a sublime gift had been vested, a gift that made everything easy, that made him pitiless. Astaire dances into the middle of a storm in the hostile nightclub, and all is well. All is well, Astaire says, legs, arms, and easy, deadly smile. All is well.

GUY IS SILENT AND fretful throughout the drive, gnawing his nails; the car has become a familiar enough space to them that Randi believes they have divined a way, sitting side by side for hours and days on end, to be apart from each other. And so they sometimes ride, hushed and remote, as if in separate rooms. Guy is a garrulous man, but prone to fits of cavernous brooding, and the indecipherable silences he enters without warning come when you might expect him to be at his chatty best: in cars, in elevators, in bed. Usually it’s fine with her because there’s always a lot of reading to get caught up with in a life. But today Randi happens to feel like talking, and Guy, what is the right way, he parries her every comment or cheery observation. She is feeling kind of put upon, to tell the truth. She hasn’t breathed a word of protest about zipping back and forth across the country, not one complaint, and so she feels it’s not unreasonable that Guy should give her a smile of acknowledgment when she points out the hawk wheeling overhead, or the horse peeking its nose out the back of its trailer, or the water tower painted red so that it looks like a giant tomato on stilts. Instead he grunts or shrugs or says ah with an exquisitely nuanced lilt to indicate a total lack of interest. She feels he ought to stop without hesitation at the roadside stands selling cherries and peaches, but he doesn’t. Lunch, she wanted to try a place they’d been driving right by for years now. Homemade pizza. Homemade ice cream. Homemade pie. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But Guy shoots by as if there were a hydrogen bomb inside.

They have not been back to the farm since dropping off the four fugitives. While not explicitly promising anything, Guy had suggested to Randi that their visits would be more frequent. Randi doesn’t want to be a harpy about the whole thing, but she feels her central point is well taken: They ought to get some kind of enjoyment out of the two thousand dollars. Concerning money, Guy has all the sense of a drunken sailor; in her mind this old phrase of her mother’s calls up the image of Guy, reeling through the streets, tossing handfuls of cash to his left and to his right. But she senses that what is operating here is a sudden wizening sense of prudence, not to say paranoia. The Cuba trip is suddenly off; they are “too hot.” No sooner are Guy’s parents back in Vegas than Guy is badgering them, trying to get information from those poor old people about his brother, Ernest: his whereabouts, his recent activities, any comments he may have made or questions he may have put to them about Guy (“No matter how innocent-sounding!”). Guy makes cheerily innocuous telephone calls from the apartment and then descends to the street to call the same people from a booth.

But what if the people he’s calling’s phones are tapped? Randi wonders.

“That’s their problem,” says Guy.

Until “the critical issues,” as he puts it, are resolved, Guy apparently intends to spend most of his time sitting in the living room on Ninetieth, drinking Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, watching the Mets on channel 9, and complaining bitterly about Tom Seaver’s sciatica.

Drops the hand he’s been tearing at back on the wheel and lifts the other to his lips. He worries and gnaws at the nails, shearing them far back from his fingertips. Occasional utterances from out of nowhere, but why bother. Totally incoherent. Here are the subjects of her husband and helpmeet’s fragmentary conversation:

The daily Tom Seaver update. They pitch him despite the pain Guy knows he’s feeling in his hip and lower back. “Excruciating,” Guy says. Excruciating.

The Bicentennial Minute gets everything wrong. “It’s a total opportunistic misread of history. You’d think for one lousy minute a night they could pick something where they weren’t afraid to tell it straight. Typical Paley. Tiffany network, my ass.”

Some newscaster in Florida blew her head off on TV and you can buy a copy of a film of her doing it for five grand. “It’s like porn, but not. You hear about that South American porn where they kill the chicks after they’re done fucking them? Down in the slums of Rio they film these guys doing these women, and then bam, they’re sawing off fingers and disemboweling them right on camera. Guys, couples, the cream of society, lining up with sackfuls of dough to get into these secret screenings, glitzier than Graumann’s Chinese. She’s not fucking, the news chick, though, is the thing. So is it worth five thou? I think yeah, because she’s a semicelebrity. Celebrities don’t have to fuck. Yet.”

Nixon, Nixon, Nixon.

It’s not until the afternoon that Guy announces “the plan.” Guy chooses to deliver the offhand announcement immediately after they blow by the restaurant over her objections, and this move so compounds his naked unconcern for her feelings that Randi chooses to view it as a kind of touching testament to the utter sincerity of Guy’s monomania. “The plan” involves, guess what, the expenditure of additional cash. “The plan” is that Guy will stay on at the farm for a couple of days, playing the part of the industrious writer checking in with his research assistants, while Randi drives north, across the New York state border, to rent yet another house. Why? Joan has called collect from a pay phone to let Guy know that Teko is freaking the fucking hell out: The propane man showed up and spent a good five minutes flirting with Tania. And plus then Tania met a little girl in the hills picking blueberries. So Teko belted her one in the face, which did not, Joan dryly suggested, mitigate the risk that they might be identified, though Teko now is making them all paint freckles on their bodies and Yolanda is in a trance of ascetic preparation, chomping on half sticks of gum to discipline her body and chanting seventeen-syllable terrorist haikus while running backward up the hills. This is how Guy puts it, anyway, tearing at his cuticles. It sounds terrible to him, suspicion and mistrust on the rise and the four of them out there in the sticks getting ready to kill one another. On top of all this, there is the general nervous tempestuousness of being a Guy Mock — type person in troubled times, and this is too much for Guy.

On the other hand, Randi has a far closer relationship than Guy with the statements that arrive each month from the bank and has been monitoring the erosion of their balance with something resembling, in the fine old phrase, mounting horror. To Guy this is a nonissue; money is never an object. She considers which has the greater palliative effect: her own frugal habits or Guy’s spendthrift ways. On the basis of close observation, she would say that however terrific it might feel to her to save half a dollar here and there, it doesn’t approach the deep fulfillment Guy evinces after he’s dumped a nice fat wad of cash. In her opinion, the reason he has been being anxious and nudgy and weird is that the money is still there, burning a hole in his pocket.